Ordinary Workdays

Some days seem quite ordinary and I suppose that they are really. John and I ate breakfast and went to the car boot sale a mile from the house. It was quiet but we bought a few things between us as we walked around the booths and aisles. I had wanted a hand cranked grinder for some time but couldn’t find the one I wanted and then there it was lying rejected on a concrete floor. £7 seemed a good price to pay of it worked and it did. I found an old mahogany table 4’ square in two 1’ laminations with 1’ drop leave all 4’ long. It had aprons and square tapered legs so we bought it for £35. The wood was lovely of course. It will make a fine tool box or something more practical than a table with wide drop leaves to wide to sit at. Another Stanley brace and a very nice wooden spokeshave seemed most ordinary and then I saw two nicely made panel gauges I thought should belong to someone other than Bill the vendor selling them…mostly because they were nicely not ordinary in that setting. I should have bought them really…to give them the home they deserved.

This wasn’t the one we bought but it was there at the sale

Back at the shop the table seemed quite settled when someone walked in and said that they really liked the table. The table had nice mahogany but the design was as I said, quite ordinary. Soon it will be a most beautiful something.

I cut these notches with an ordinary knife and a chisel. They sliced the wood neatly and exactly as I placed the square on the increment marks I wanted. The inclined incisions are critically important to my goal, yet my goal is quite ordinary. It took a while to develop this and when it was done it was less to me than the effort I put in to achieve it. John sharpened more tools and we talked the whole time about things that mattered to him and then things that mattered to me. Mostly we shared the same pockets were what we liked we enjoyed over a coffee and the same music.

People drifted in and out all week as all of these things that are ordinary to us occurred minute by minute. I think that it’s a true thing that when we do things over and over for a length of time, like slicing notches for an hour, they become ordinary to us. What’s ordinary to me is often extraordinary to those who come from somewhere ordinary to them. Surely that’s an important thing to grasp. Two small girls came in to the workshop. Elena and Lucy. They were lovely to visit with and so too their parents. I wrote their names neatly on an ordinary piece of pine in pencil and then erased them with my plane. The shavings were quite thick and I showed them how I had erased their names from the pine block. They were amused and perhaps a little sad to see their names disappear with one swipe until I pulled the shavings and the names from the throat of the plane and curled them around their wrists. I don’t know what a pine bookmark shaving will mean to them in their future, but their young noses will remind them of some ordinary minutes with an ordinary man when a name disappeared and reappeared for them to keep. I concluded that there is nothing wrong with an ordinary day shared with ordinary people because ordinary things we do with our hands affect us all very greatly.